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Sunday July 14, 2013 6:18 AM

I was walking in the country the other day when I happened upon a morning-glory plant with its
trumpet-shaped flowers blaring a fanfare to the morning sunshine.

Morning-glory flowers open in early morning and begin to close by midday. The plants were
imported into the United State to be a garden flower, and they eventually escaped cultivation and
went wild. That got me thinking about how some folks consider the morning glory a weed. When is a
plant a weed, and when is it a wildflower?

“That’s not an easy question” to answer, said Jim McCormac, who is a botanist as well as a bird
expert for the Ohio Division of Wildlife. He said the answer is probably “in the eye of the
beholder.”

Many plants blooming now in the summer fit into the same category as the morning glory,
including the common milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace and chicory.

Then there are some alien plants that definitely fit in the noxious-weed category, such as bush
honeysuckle, purple loosestrife, poison hemlock and garlic mustard, McCormac said. Those nonnative
plants overrun our native habitat.

As a botanist, McCormac defines a weed in a way that might seem a bit more technical than most
of us embrace. He considers any plant a weed if it was not indigenous, before European settlement,
to where it now grows.

But most of us like Queen Anne’s lace even though it’s not native. It is so attractive that the
queen of England is said to have adorned her hair with the blooms.

And common milkweed is highly favored by butterflies as a food source. Anything that butterflies
can use is a good plant in my mind.

Chicory, with its blue flowers, has long been used as a substitute for coffee and is still sold
commercially in places.

Besides sometimes being useful, these plants add a classic summer touch to our drives through
the countryside. I consider them all wildflowers.

On the other hand, plants such as poison hemlock have no redeeming factors. Hemlocks are the
bushes with white blooms that we see along road in the late spring and early summer. They take over
the landscape, and the poison that killed the Greek scholar Socrates reportedly was made from
poison hemlock.

Purple loosestrife is indeed beautiful and was once sold at garden centers, but it escaped
gardens to clog bays and backwaters and deprive them of native plants that are vital to wildlife.
Garlic mustard and bush honeysuckle did the same thing to the understory of woods and forests, and
environmentalists constantly strive to control them.

So you see, there is a lot to consider before you decide whether a plant is a weed or a
wildflower. I’m an easy touch, though, and tend to like more plants than not.